For a few years, thought has been given to the problems related to the increase in air traffic and notably to the significant workload that this involves for aircraft crews. Specifically, the number of tasks to be carried out by the crew is increasing, while the trend is to reduce the number of crew members.
The automation of certain flight management systems makes it possible to free the crew from certain routine tasks not requiring human expertise. For example, certain systems make it possible to manage instructions originating from an air traffic controller or an airline. The management of these instructions is done by way of communication-routing equipment and their graphical interface. When certain instructions have an impact on the conduct of the flight, for example on the flight plan, the said instructions may be inserted in a semi-automatic or entirely automatic manner into computers responsible for flight management. However, the integration of these automation facilities into computers is expensive and remains fairly limited. Certain instructions are therefore taken into account in an entirely manual manner. Moreover, voice or digital messages arising from an airline as well as the various tasks to be carried out in the course of the flight are hardly, if at all, integrated into the embedded cockpit systems; when they are integrated, this is done in an inhomogeneous manner. The crew may not therefore have a chronological overall picture of the tasks to be carried out in the course of the flight. It is difficult for the crew, under these conditions, to schedule their work so as to split the workload in an optimal manner. Thus the crew may find themselves in situations where they must process a number of important tasks concomitantly. This may lead for example to task omissions and be detrimental to flight safety.